Food waste in our country comes from a number of different sources: farms, grocery stores, homes and more. Pretty much every step of the food industry adds to the 40% of food wasted every year in our country.
A large chunk of food waste is because of us, the consumer. This could include food we buy in the store and never use and also the food we purchase outside of the home that gets thrown out because of fullness, or lack of means to transport leftovers.
Go outside any restaurant on a busy night, and the scene above is probably what you’ll see. (Seattle Times)
Restaurants have a large hand in the problem of food waste. An estimated 571,000 tons of edible food is wasted by just restaurants. This equals an economic value of about $2,282 per ton of waste. A study in 2014 from the Business for Social Responsibility found that almost of food not served to customers, 85% of food in restaurants in America is wasted, about 14% is recycled, and a little over one% is donated.
According to the Green Restaurant Association, the average restaurant produces 100,000 pounds of garbage per year, with 25,000 to 75,000 of this being food waste.
A senior analyst in the waste division of the Environmental Protection Agency has said that food waste is the number one material that goes into landfills.
The restaurant industry includes several types of food service businesses: cafeteria operations, fast food, casual restaurants and fine dining establishments. Within each of these types, a different strategy for managing food waste is needed. Fast food is mostly consumed off property, so there is less waste produced than a cafeteria, where everything is mostly consumed on site.
The restaurant industry seems to have an issue with food waste, as most of it ends up being disposed of instead of recycled or donated.
Restaurants do face obstacles when it comes to dealing with food waste. As far as donating food, there are a few challenges. Depending on the size of the company, these obstacles may be different, but the biggest factors are transportation constraints, insufficient storage or refrigeration, and liability concerns.
For recycling food waste, insufficient recycling options and transportation are top obstacles.
A lot of restaurants are now realizing the problem of food waste, and have made it a goal to have zero waste. You can read about a few of them on NPR.
But this problem can only be fixed if restaurant owners, chefs and cooks, and other employees actually begin to care about the problem.
But there are solutions to this problem – if people want to help fix it.
For restaurants, having smaller portion sizes and adequate sized to go containers will reduce the amount of food wasted by customers. Also serving half portions of meals may reduce the amount not eaten, or thrown away.
For those in the back of restaurants making the food, there are options as well. Having proper training on food waste may help, as well as finding ways to utilize an entire product instead of throwing pieces away (such as using broccoli stems instead of throwing them out).
Another issue is that of composting. I recently spoke with a chef at a small restaurant in Longmont, West Side Tavern. We were talking about the food waste at the restaurant, and what he does to combat it. The first way is only buying what the restaurant needs, and using everything that was bought on the menu. The restaurant tries to buy as much locally as possible, and everything bought is used. They used to have a compost area outside, but the smell was too much for the business, as well as neighboring homes, so the restaurant got rid of it.
Instead of getting rid of composting, there should be some other opportunity for them to deal with their food scraps/waste, instead of just throwing it away (which would produce a smell as well).
Not all restaurants have the opportunity to compost or recycle like others, but change can still be made if the community wants to go in that direction. Talking to local restauranteurs, owners, city council members, etc., to create an open dialogue about the problem may be one way that this could become a priority.
Certain communities have imposed a fine on community members if they don’t compost their food waste (Read more here), and the same could be done for restaurants. Maybe imposing fines would give restaurants more incentives to actually care about the food they are wasting, instead of throwing it in the trash.
The National Restaurant Association developed a program to help restaurants with waste. The Conserve programpartners with several different businesses, and research facilities to help work together to reduce food waste.
Two legislative actions were put in place to help with food waste as well. The Federal Food Donation Act was put in place to encourage food donation. A revised versionof the act was introduced this year to expand liability protections for those donating food. The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act was signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, in an effort to protect donors from criminal liability.
Restaurant food waste is something we can all work on, but only if we all try and make a difference.
